Life Writing in the Family

In 2008, I was invited by a scholarly journal to write an autobiographical essay retracing the process by which I had become a historian. Having exploited the autobiographical writings of other historians for my own purposes in my book, History, Historians and Autobiography, I could hardly refuse to take the plunge myself. As I wrote my essay, I found myself reflecting on the fact that I was not only joining other members of my professional "family" of scholars who had engaged in autobiographical writing, but that I was also following in a family tradition. I was, in fact, becoming the fourth generation of my father's family to make some serious effort at putting down the story of my life in written form. That my family was prone to such ventures was not a new discovery for me: a copy of my grandmother Zelda Popkin's autobiography, Open Every Door, published in 1956, had always stood on my parents' bookshelves alongside the thirteen detective stories and novels she published. I had drawn on her book in 1999 when I undertook my first venture into family-connected life writing, a biographical essay about Zelda's pioneering stories about the Holocaust and the creation of the state of Israel ("Forgotten"). At that time, however, I was still beginning my own exploration of the problems of autobiography, and I had not yet broadened my horizons to include an interest in the theoretical problems presented by other forms of life writing. I also had barely begun to see myself in the role of the preserver of family documents.

As I worked on my autobiographical essay in 2008, I learned that, in addition to the life-writing tradition on my father's side of the family, I was the third generation of my mother's family to do something similar. I made this latter discovery because circumstances had by then led me to become the family archivist. It fell on me to sort my father's personal papers after his death in 2005 and then to help my mother pack up her apartment in preparation for her move to a retirement community in 2008. As a historian devoted to the study of old documents and as a scholar of life writing with an interest in how people write about their own lives, I naturally wanted to preserve as many of my parents' letters and records as possible. My embrace of this role of archivist—not always appreciated by my wife, who has had to concede precious space in our house to a growing collection of papers that have nothing to do with her ancestors—is connected to the fact that I have also increasingly committed myself to being something of a biographer of my ancestors. In addition to the article about my grandmother, I have by now written three essays about my father, the philosopher Richard H. Popkin ("His Own," "Legacies," and "Richard Popkin"). As I have engaged in these various projects connected to family history, they have become explicitly informed by my own developing scholarly interest in life writing. In my case, the boundaries between historical work, life-writing scholarship, autobiographical self-exploration, and family matters have become increasingly porous. This ongoing experience offers the occasion for reflection on the ways in which my personal embeddedness in various strands of family narrative is connected to my interest in the past, both historical and personal, as well as on the ways in which my personal engagement as document-collector, biographer, and life writer may illuminate scholarly issues in history and life-writing studies.

While the materials I am describing are, for the most part, essentially private papers, the issues they raise seem to be in the scholarly atmosphere. At the 2008 International Auto/Biography Association meeting in Honolulu, I found myself having lunch with a half dozen other professors, all of whom were in one way or another engaged with projects about members of their own families. Is it a coincidence that we were all from Jewish backgrounds? Many of us had been affected by our reading of The Lost: A Search for...